Selfie Spirituality
Have you noticed it? Selfies. Selfies everywhere. Selfies on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I’m not gonna lie, I’ve even taken a few. Selfie sticks, which were once thought ridiculous, are now common and acceptable. And it’s affecting everything we do, including how we relate to God.
God?
Yes, God.
Whether you instagrammed the last time you went out for coffee to read your Bible, pinned the latest margin that you colored in in your Bible, or hashtagged yourself doing something noble for the world to see, we have a ton of new ways to let people know we’re being spiritual. But our hearts haven’t caught up with our technology.
Jesus said, “Watch out! Don’t do your good deeds publicly, to be admired by others, for you will lose the reward from your Father in Heaven,” (Matthew 6:2). He goes on to talk about three different areas where this applies: giving, praying, and fasting. I’m sure there are tons of other sacrifices and disciplines He could have mentioned. But the principle is this: If you try and get recognition for what you do, you can have it, but that will be your only reward.
Instead, Jesus offers us rewards in Heaven for the things we do that no one else know about. I’ve gone too far with this. I’ve shut people out of my life in weird ways so they don’t know the good I’ve done. But it’s the heart that Jesus is going after: Are you doing what you’re doing to be admired by others?
If you’ve hung around this long, there’s a secret I want to share: There is an intimacy with God that comes from sacrifice that no one sees and its worth more than all the likes and retweets this world has to offer. Begin a secret life with God. Not a fake life, but do things that only He can see. Start asking Him for things that benefit the world, but only you and He know about. Give to someone who could never repay without being linked to the giving. And all the while, talk to Jesus about it and get His heart.
And if you get His heart, you will never, ever want to trade it for another like again.
Knowing the Unknowable God
One of the realities I struggle with many days in my walk with God is “How far is too far?” I know that seems like a weird question to ask when I’m talking about God. But the question is never, “Have I gone after Jesus too hard in a way that makes me unrelatable to the rest of the world?” More often the question is, “I sure feel like I’ve gone a long ways, but maybe there’s more of God and I’ve settled for too little. Could I have not gone far enough?”
Maybe you can relate.
But the mystery of God is this: God is unknowable and yet He invites us to know Him.
God is unknowable: He’s God because He is bigger and more complex than you. He measures out the universe in span of His hand. We’re talking about the God who laid the foundations of the world and taught the stars how to shine. He created the star and created the atom and everything in between and holds it all together through the word of His power. He knows you and your ways far better than you know Him. If you could fully understand God, if you could get your tiny human mind around Him and His ways, if you could know Him fully, He would cease to be God. You want a God that’s bigger than you.
And yet…
God wants to be known: We first see Him creating a world where He can relate to people. Then people break that special bond they have with Him and hide and He goes to find them. He spends thousands of years beckoning and whispering to people that He will come and break the curse that we’ve put on ourselves only to finally end up shouting in fragile form of His Son, Jesus Christ. And with the final act of laying down His life Jesus atones for our sins against Him and the veil that separated God from man is torn in two, signaling an end to us being shut out from His presence.
So, yes, God is unknowable. But He wants to be known.
Which is why Paul prays in Ephesians 3 this prayer:
I pray that…you have the power to understand…how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is….though it is too great to understand fully.
-Ephesians 3:16-19
Friends, God knows He’s too big for us. He knows we will never fully comprehend Him and His love for us. He knows that He is an ocean of love and our small, frail hearts are the size of a thimble. We can never fully hold the vastness of who He is.
But this, I think is a secret to God’s heart, that if you understand, will help you grow in Him:
He invites us to try anyways.
Friends, I don’t think the issue is to get a certain amount of God. That would be impossible. I think the answer is to keep opening your heart to receive more of Him, knowing that you will never be able to comprehend it all. Be okay with the God who is bigger than you. Who has more love than you. And keep opening your heart knowing it will never be able to hold everything God has to give.
Today, I pray that you would have the power to understand how wide, how long, how high, and how deep the love of Christ is, though it’s too big for you anyways.
Ministry Lessons from A Wash Basin
Yesterday I had a brother write in with questions about offices, ordination, and titles because of my article about how we embraced shepherds as a house church network. And it deserves a better response than I can give today.
The problem when we start talking about any kind of ministry is our heads have been clouded with hundreds of years of historical context that tell us a ministry is a position of privilege. Ministers are the known, the great, the ones with clout in our eyes.
But Jesus has a much different definition of ministry than we do. In fact, in the Greek that the New Testament was written in, a ministry was a position of service. Some uses of the word minister refer to someone who serves at a cost to themselves.
Nowhere is this more evident for me than in Jesus’ lesson to the disciples in the upper room in John 13. Jesus gives the disciples and us an example to follow by getting down on the floor and washing the filthy feet of those in the room. This was a job reserved for a lowly servant. And then he says this:
After washing their feet, he put on his robe again and sat down and asked, “Do you understand what I was doing? You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and you are right, because that’s what I am. And since I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash each other’s feet. I have given you an example to follow. Do as I have done to you. I tell you the truth, slaves are not greater than their master. Nor is the messenger more important than the one who sends the message.
-John 13:12-16
Have you ever washed someones feet? It’s not a glorious process, even today, where at least in the West our streets are much cleaner. It’s humbling, both to wash feet and to have your feet washed. And if Jesus calls us to any kind of ministry (re: service) it’s this. To humble ourselves and get lower than others and do what no one else would be willing to do.
Hundreds of years of church history has taught us that ministry is being the smartest man in the room, having the most honor, or being paid to be spiritual. But at it’s core, ministry is service, humbling service, in the same style that our Master modeled for us. Until we get that idea right in our heads, our hearts, and our spirits, all ministry will be wrong, whether it is titled or not.
Photo Credit: psk-footwash-small by peterskim
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 